here’s something i could remember more often
Because seriously now, how many times have I seen the name “Katt WIlliams” and thought, “I used to love The Greatest American Hero!!”
My songs are now on Spotify!
Thanks to Fandalism Distro, my songs are now on Spotify. Of course, they all have “- true mix” suffixed to each track, but that bug will be fixed next week.
It took only a couple of days after that original email to get the EP online on Spotify. As for iTunes? Well, it should be up sooner or later.
To check out the music on Spotify, just go to Your Secret Identity!
Fandalism Distro is back on track
I did say that I’ll be updating you all with the latest on Fandalism Distro. So here’s one.
This morning I got an email from the maker of Fandalism stating that his development is back on track, and there are over 700 albums waiting to be inserted into Spotify, Google Play, and iTunes.
He can only submit 100 albums for the first week, so I expect to see my music uploaded on Saturday — or hopefully on my birthday (HINT HINT).
The best part of Fandalism Distro, and Philip Kaplan is quick to constantly point this out, is that his service, Fandalism Distro, will be the fastest way to submit music to these three stores. You upload your songs to the site, and “within minutes” the songs will be submitted to the respective stores.
Of course, then there’s iTunes’ and Spotify’s 1-3 day waiting period (Google has 14).
Some time this week he will hammer out the details of payment. And I have yet to see the Analytics pages. But I will go over the processes with you once I have seen them. Sit tight, true believers!
I’m trying out Fandalism Distro
Note: Fandalism Distro is a new online service for getting your music onto iTunes and Spotify, and Google Play. It’s so new that you can’t just sign up and run it — you have to be invited into the group. Also, there are still bugs to be worked out, as I found out today.
The other day I uploaded some songs to Fandalism Distro, a new site for sharing/selling your music through the iTunes and Google stores, as well as free streaming through Spotify. The service is $19.99 per year for unlimited tracks, and advertises that you get to keep all revenue.
I figured, what do I have to lose except up to $19.99/yr, and hopefully much less?
The reason for the decision
Here’s TuneCore’s pricing (as of 8th April, 2013): $29.99 for the first year, $49.99 each additional year. That’s PER ALBUM. They put your music on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, and even MySpace! (Yeah, MySpace!)
CDBaby offers a one-time $49 fee, and takes 9% of each sale.
While I’m sure TuneCore provides a great service and everything at your fingertips, if I can save 60% per year (or 33.3-repeating% the first year), I’m happy to see what the outcome is.
The Good
I got the email invite code, set up the payment plan, and got to work right away. All the artwork for my albums were originally done at line 180dpi so I had to upscale the images, but it’s all lo-fi single guy work, so I don’t really care that much about the quality. It looks good enough, and will have that “not so new” aura about it, which is fine by me.
I ripped all the songs from CD into WAV files for hi-quality output (since I lost all my song masters when my hard drive crashed), and uploaded them within minutes.
Minutes after that (and I mean less than ten) each album had a UPC code, and an ISRC was assigned to each song. All I have to do now is wait for the songs to show up on the online music places!
(updates about how things are going will appear in subsequent blog posts)
The Bad
The only downside is probably that it’s just a guy running the site. The realisation of the downside came this morning in an email to me. Philip Kaplan, creator of Fandalism, has an “awesome” back-end system, but ran into development issues which pushed his work back by about four whole weeks. And while there is much evidence that a small team of one to three developers is sometimes all you need to make it big, there have also been plenty of cases where this just isn’t the case.
To you, Mr. Kaplan, I have all the faith.
(again, updates about how things are going will appear in a future post)
A bottom line, if you need one
In an interview, Kaplan stated that he is not pricing it low to out-price everyone and be the worldwide distributor of music to only stores. He doesn’t expect this to be a huge source of revenue for him. He is running the service to help bring people to the main site, a sort of social network of musicians and performers, complete with videos. Everywhere.
Wanna try out Fandalism Distro but don’t want to pay? There’s a free option. Drop your email into the queue. Find one good song and upload a single. See what comes of it. If you love how things are going, then you can drop $20/yr for the service. I think it was worth trying out immediately, and I can’t wait to see how everything looks in a month.
Drug testing and welfare
A couple of things.
1. I cannot attest to the validity of the above statement.
2. Morgan Freeman did not say that.
3. I bet you read it in Morgan Freeman’s voice.
4. I actually saw this attached to a Will Smith page on Facebook and read it in Will Smith’s voice. Turns out it was a guy who just calls himself that but his name’s Shane.
I didn’t know Michael Jackson was on Community
Watching old episodes of Community. Because I miss the old Community. Come across this:
Sorry. It’s late and I’m an insomniac.
This is what’s wrong with Community, all in one shot
In this week’s episode of Community “Conventions of Space and Time,” Troy and Abed somehow convince the rest of the study group to go to an Inspector Spacetime convention.
So of course, like any good sitcom, they leave behind two people who decide to go anyway, the young girl fantasizes about being married to the older man, the girlfriend doesn’t like sci-fi, and the mentally dubious one learns a lesson he should have learned two seasons ago.
Anyway, one of the sub-plots has Pierce giving advice to a TV focus group. The way he and Shirley end up in this predicament … well, I don’t know if it’s more unfunny, or more insulting to a large segment of the population. Or maybe I”m just overly sensitive in my weakened and ill state.
Well anyway, so that happens, Matt Lucas locks Abed in a phone booth, Jeff takes off his shirt, and then I like the outro for all the wrong reasons. Continue reading “This is what’s wrong with Community, all in one shot” »
My revised review of the Digitech Vocalist Live 3
On Monday, after grabbing a Digitech Vocal Live 3 from my local big-box music store, I wrote about my initial experience with it. It can add a rich vocal harmony to your vocals, but it doesn’t read suspended chords very well, and it grabs your guitar sound from the mic and even harmonises that.
And also, the vocal signal is missing any real dynamic frequency range. I absolutely hated the sound I was getting out of the “unprocessed” signal, even when dialling the high and low cut levels to flat.
So, when I did the initial recording tests, I used the MXL 990 (left), which captures both my guitar and vocals very beautifully in one go. But it clearly was the wrong mic to use with the VL3. I promptly trashed those recordings. And then I fished out my old, trusty, Senheiser E835 and plugged it in.
The Senheiser mic is actually quite comparable to Shure’s flagship vocal microphone. When I need to replace this, it’ll be a tough call between this and a Shure SM58. But for now, I have this little guy to give the pedal one last chance to prove itself. And so how did the Digitech Vocal Live 3 fare this time around?
Continue reading “My revised review of the Digitech Vocalist Live 3” »
How am I so sick?
This morning I woke up early, and even played two songs on guitar!
Suddenly, after lunch I’m feeling horrible. I get home at like …. what …. five, and I’m out for two hours!
So, yeah. I’m sick.
Hi.
My iPhone knows I’m American
